Games Studies Journal new issue

The new issue of the Games Studies journal, Volume 6, Issue 1 was published in December, just in case you missed it in the holiday rush. Here are the contents:

Nick Montfort: Combat in Context

Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games

Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth

Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn – A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay

Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

Thaddeus Griebel: Self-Portrayal in a Simulated Life: Projecting Personality and Values in The Sims 2
Charles Paulk: Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design

Benjamin Wai-ming Ng: Street Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong: A Study of Cultural Consumption and Localization of Japanese Games in an Asian Context

Jonas Heide Smith: The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games

Hector Rodriguez: The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens

Jussi Parikka, Jaakko Suominen: Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement

It’s very readable and generally doesn’t suffer the usual problem of opaque (read: badly written) cultural theory texts. For some reason I particularly enjoyed the fact that Nick Montfort’s Combat in Context included the entire 2KB of machine code for Atari’s Combat game.